Re:Why is this a concern in and of itself?
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
Most guys I've known in IT went into it because that's what they did in their free time.
I have a few female friends how ran MUSHs and MUDs but for the most part they weren't into the whole hacking, cracking, hardware end of things. They were INTELLIGENT. It was just a matter of interest.
The grandparent poster was refering to general principles relating to all life.
The parent poster yelled at the grandparent for not calling "offspring" "babies".
He's obviously talking about NOT DESTROYING AN *INDIVIDUAL* *HUMAN* LIFE.
The Grandparent obviously wasn't, though, and his thread determines the context for the conversation.
Though to take up your subject explicitly, neither you nor the parent provide clear scientific guidelines for "individual" or "human" which is relevant considering conservative opposition to stem cell research.
A stem cell line in the lab is like a human. A stem cell in your body is not. Leaving a child to die is neglect. Allowing an embryo in your body to die 'naturally' is not. Or so the current legal standards run.
The simple fact is that most of our morality is predicated on whether somthing is human or not, and fails to address why humans get priveledges and animals don't. Unless, of course, you're using a talmudic standard where animals take on rights as they contribute to society.
But if an organism is created with a single human gene, is it human? What about two human genes? What about if half of its genome is human. Saying "Don't do it" is only going to work for so long. Eventually it will happen and we'll have to interact with such creatures in some sort of moral context.
I'm trying to point out that those advocating "biblical" morality (which doesn't even have any consistant biblical basis) are simply not using any kind of consistant standard, and tolerating "death of a human life" in one case while discouraging the same fate for the same life in another.
No. It has been always acceptable to, in cases of extremely serious illness, to deny treatment other than nutrition and shelter and leave the future of the life in God's hands.
Try that with a human child and you may be considered guilty of neglect.
Welcome to this retrograde new world: where the "self-defense" of the "stronger" individual is the foundation of the law and the arbiter of life and death.
Stronger here, meaning more likely to survive. This is not Nietzche.
Or is the failure of a parent to approve the *forced* separation of conjoined twins, that would definitely kill one of them, approval for murder?
In morally ambiguous cases like this, I would prefer the decision to be in the hands of the family involved, rather than in the hands of an arbitrary state. If a parent does force the separation of conjoined twins, resulting in the early death of one and the prolonged life of the other, when otherwise both twins would have both died, I would not ask that anyone be tried for murder.
We tell our kids about the Spartans at Thermopylae, and The Trojan Horse, The Sack of Troy and so on. We tell them about valiant men who put whole civilisations being put to the sword.
No we don't. I had to read about it in magazines in my parent's basement.
Since he was talking about life in general, parent to offspring is more appropriate, given that some life forms reproduce asexually, and most life forms are not human. Similarly, offspring implies the organism for its entire life while "baby" has far more specific connotations.
Of course, offspring still applies to humans. Don't be a jerk and try to correct someone when they haven't said anything incorrect.
Actually, when you phrase it that way, the moral imperative is clear. Life must always be protected under the law.
If a guy masturbates, should he be arrested for murder?
If a doctor takes blood cells from someone's finger and that person gives consent, should the doctor be arrested for murdering the blood cells?
Many embryos are spontaneously aborted by the human body due to genetic abnormalities. Those lives can be preserved if doctors proscribe mandatory anti-aborfactants for all expectant mothers. Should fail to take such medicaton be considered child abuse, murder or neglect?
Maybe 'non-hierarchical' is closer to what they're getting at?
You probably associate "democracy" with "liberal democracy" and thats the most common definition, but not the only one.
Of course, democracy is literally rule by the people. In this instance, you're giving power to the readers of a text to also be the editors in the same way that democracy allows citizens to also participate in the political process.
If I had to stretch my imagination for every story like this, my brain would look like the goatse guy.
An open mind is a good thing.
Re:Shouldn't this be modded down?
on
Sim Epidemic
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· Score: 1
You know my post was a joke, right?
Just making sure.
Re:Problems with models
on
Sim Epidemic
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I also think that, (last time I checked, anyways) the government agencies base their models for the evolution of infectious disease on Burnette and White's model which is based primarily on airborne diseases, but applied, often badly, to waterborne diseases.
Sexualy transmitted epidemics like 'the AIDS epidemic' make for difficult modles because people's sexual behavior has changed dramatically from 1950 - the present. Like you said, so many factors there.
If they did this, it would be nice if it were possible to alter the virulence, incubation time, genetic diversity and mutation rate of a particular pathogen.
Likewise, it'd be nice if you could model virulence. If you infected people with a highly virulent airborne virus in California, by the time it got to New York it would be slightly less virulent because airborne viruses tend to evolve towards fairly benign coexistance over the long run (If your host is sick at home in bed, he isn't in the office passing the disease on to his coworkers.)
If you have any information on the planning of these games, I'd love to see it.
Shouldn't this be modded down?
on
Sim Epidemic
·
· Score: 3, Funny
After all, it is basically a "WHO's on first" post.
I think the idea thing about internet downloads (from the content maker's standpoint) is that they could customize the commercials to your interests, greatly increasing the value of ad revenue.
If they force users to use a particular format and player (and some would probably agree to) then they could update the promotions when you logged on to the net.
So the statement that 'this was not hindsight' is wrong.
This is not meerly hindsight" i.e. a situation that is only understood after the fact. There were many who predicted this outcome beforehand based on evidence, and were criticized for it. In hindsight, their prediction is confirmed.
Make sense now?
Precision and accuracy is what you are arguing for from governments. To not be precise yourself is hypocritical.
I'm arguing that they should make their best effort to present accurate information which they clearly have not done.
You know that it's impossible to prove that someone knowingly lied because a person's mind is a black box. The only way that I could do that is to give you some paper from inside the Bush administration or the CIA that ammounts to a confession. And I don't think those organizations are so stupid as to allow such information to float around freely. I believe that the executive branch lied in its case for war, and presented the evidence available to me to demonstrate this. I don't know which members of the executive branch originated the disinformation, but Bush chose his cabinet and is responsible for them.
The fact that members of the CIA were harrassed for presenting evidence contrary to the Administration line indicates that this was not simply a mistake, but was willful.
Put simply, the executive branch made claims that they should have known were not true, because independant agencies knew the claims were not true. They made clear efforts to intimidate individuals and nations who presented evidence to the contrary, indicating that they weren't simply listening to all sides and then reaching a reasonable, but incorrect, answer.
It is vindication based on highsight, and is irrelevant to the question as to whether anyone actually deliberately lied.
How else do you expect someone to be vindicated?
Honestly?
All vindication is based on hindsight. We have officials saying "we didn't know" despite the fact that they were being told so repeatedly.
Maybe they didn't hear. Maybe they didn't believe. Willful ignorance is as good as lying and I don't see the use of arguing the difference.
Q: Of course, if we can't get the information that we need to represent our own interests, what's the point of a democracy to begin with?
A: Because in the real world, secrecy is necessary sometimes, and governments make mistakes. To believe otherwise is both idealistic and naive.
Speaking of non-sequiters, you completly evaded my question. This is beyond a mistakes and secrets. We're talking about a group (you can say the CIA or the Executive branch, as you chose) putting forward claims that they knew to be discredited in order to make their case and ruining the careers of CIA agents who disagree with them.
Obviously, it's difficult to prove that someone "knew somthing to be false" if they don't want it known. For this reason, laws typically revolve, not simply around what a person does know, but what they should reasonably be expected to know and to find out (i.e. due dilligence.) Ignorance of the law is not an adequate defense, or it would be difficult to next to impossible to convict anyone. Similarly, lack of due dilligence on a matter of remarkable importance such as this should be called 'dishonest.' So to demonstrate dishonesty, we need to set a standard for due dilligence.
Particularly, we need to ask why US intelligence produced information which was worse than other international bodies.
On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. "The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic," ElBaradei said.
One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, "These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking."
The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency's Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.
It took Baute's team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_ fa ct1
True. But I don't quite buy the whole "right left" dichotomy for American politics. Both parties have consistently advocated growing the size of the government, despite the Republican rhetoric against such government growth.
No. If you are told by your intelligence services that there is proof, and you believe them, you say that, and then the intelligence services were mistaken, you did not lie. You were misled. There is a difference.
What makes you think that Bush listened to his intelligence services? They discredited the whole "Iraqi yellowcake" reports. They warned Bush against Chalabi, saying he was an Iranian agent.
Bush stovepiped and cherrypicked information, and he retaliated against those in the intelligence community who spoke out or refused to go along.
Well, that is kind of the point, isn't it? Its all very fine to say what we now know. This is called 'hindsight'.
But it's not "hindsight." It's vindication. There were plenty of people calling bullshit on the reports of Iraqi nuclear weapons and attempts to procure yellowcake even before the Iraq war, but they were called sympathizers of Saddam.
Now it turns out they were right after all.
There were people who asked, when the US gov. ordered 2000 body bags before the war in Afghanistan, whether that meant the govermnet was predicting that level of casualties. We were told they wouldn't be nearly that high. Guess what? It looks like we'll have a use for every one of those bags.
We were told to trust our leaders because they were the only ones who had all the information. It turns out that trust was misplaced and they didn't have any special information. The old excuse "if you knew what I know" is often faulty.
Time and again, those with power refuse to give us accurate information because then we wouldn't make the decisions that they want us to make. "Rebuilding Iraq will pay for itself in oil revenues, etc. etc.". Of course, if we can't get the information that we need to represent our own interests, what's the point of a democracy to begin with?
Key, no. Material? Yes. Otherwise the claim wouldn't have been made. To make a material claim about somthing that you know to be false is as good a definition of a lie as I can think of.
I don't think I can top that, but I suppose I'd take a page from shrinkwrap liscenses and say "this candidate does not come with any warrenties, not even the implied warranty of fitness. By casting this ballot you accept responsibility for the actions of this candidate, if elected, regardless of whether or not said candidate performs to advertised standards. "
Slashdot Mirror
Most guys I've known in IT went into it because that's what they did in their free time.
I have a few female friends how ran MUSHs and MUDs but for the most part they weren't into the whole hacking, cracking, hardware end of things. They were INTELLIGENT. It was just a matter of interest.
girls who go into IT to meet men? I've never heard of such a thing.
Not nessicarily.
Some people take liberal to mean the same as progressive or leftists, which is another dictionary definition.
Libertarians are what some would call "classic liberals."
I know at one point at least a human made a move other than what Deep Blue told him to do. Not sure if that's what's being refered to. Maybe not.
The grandparent poster was refering to general principles relating to all life.
The parent poster yelled at the grandparent for not calling "offspring" "babies".
He's obviously talking about NOT DESTROYING AN *INDIVIDUAL* *HUMAN* LIFE.
The Grandparent obviously wasn't, though, and his thread determines the context for the conversation.
Though to take up your subject explicitly, neither you nor the parent provide clear scientific guidelines for "individual" or "human" which is relevant considering conservative opposition to stem cell research.
A stem cell line in the lab is like a human. A stem cell in your body is not. Leaving a child to die is neglect. Allowing an embryo in your body to die 'naturally' is not. Or so the current legal standards run.
The simple fact is that most of our morality is predicated on whether somthing is human or not, and fails to address why humans get priveledges and animals don't. Unless, of course, you're using a talmudic standard where animals take on rights as they contribute to society.
But if an organism is created with a single human gene, is it human? What about two human genes? What about if half of its genome is human. Saying "Don't do it" is only going to work for so long. Eventually it will happen and we'll have to interact with such creatures in some sort of moral context.
I'm trying to point out that those advocating "biblical" morality (which doesn't even have any consistant biblical basis) are simply not using any kind of consistant standard, and tolerating "death of a human life" in one case while discouraging the same fate for the same life in another.
No. It has been always acceptable to, in cases of extremely serious illness, to deny treatment other than nutrition and shelter and leave the future of the life in God's hands.
Try that with a human child and you may be considered guilty of neglect.
Welcome to this retrograde new world: where the "self-defense" of the "stronger" individual is the foundation of the law and the arbiter of life and death.
Stronger here, meaning more likely to survive. This is not Nietzche.
Or is the failure of a parent to approve the *forced* separation of conjoined twins, that would definitely kill one of them, approval for murder?
In morally ambiguous cases like this, I would prefer the decision to be in the hands of the family involved, rather than in the hands of an arbitrary state. If a parent does force the separation of conjoined twins, resulting in the early death of one and the prolonged life of the other, when otherwise both twins would have both died, I would not ask that anyone be tried for murder.
We tell our kids about the Spartans at Thermopylae, and The Trojan Horse, The Sack of Troy and so on. We tell them about valiant men who put whole civilisations being put to the sword.
No we don't. I had to read about it in magazines in my parent's basement.
Look into bacteriophage therapy.
:)
I've posted a few articles to Slashdot but they've all been rejected.
It's sustainably developed antibiotics!
Good stuff.
Since he was talking about life in general, parent to offspring is more appropriate, given that some life forms reproduce asexually, and most life forms are not human. Similarly, offspring implies the organism for its entire life while "baby" has far more specific connotations.
Of course, offspring still applies to humans. Don't be a jerk and try to correct someone when they haven't said anything incorrect.
Actually, when you phrase it that way, the moral imperative is clear. Life must always be protected under the law.
If a guy masturbates, should he be arrested for murder?
If a doctor takes blood cells from someone's finger and that person gives consent, should the doctor be arrested for murdering the blood cells?
Many embryos are spontaneously aborted by the human body due to genetic abnormalities. Those lives can be preserved if doctors proscribe mandatory anti-aborfactants for all expectant mothers. Should fail to take such medicaton be considered child abuse, murder or neglect?
Maybe 'non-hierarchical' is closer to what they're getting at?
You probably associate "democracy" with "liberal democracy" and thats the most common definition, but not the only one.
Of course, democracy is literally rule by the people. In this instance, you're giving power to the readers of a text to also be the editors in the same way that democracy allows citizens to also participate in the political process.
If I had to stretch my imagination for every story like this, my brain would look like the goatse guy.
An open mind is a good thing.
You know my post was a joke, right?
Just making sure.
I also think that, (last time I checked, anyways) the government agencies base their models for the evolution of infectious disease on Burnette and White's model which is based primarily on airborne diseases, but applied, often badly, to waterborne diseases.
Sexualy transmitted epidemics like 'the AIDS epidemic' make for difficult modles because people's sexual behavior has changed dramatically from 1950 - the present. Like you said, so many factors there.
If they did this, it would be nice if it were possible to alter the virulence, incubation time, genetic diversity and mutation rate of a particular pathogen.
Likewise, it'd be nice if you could model virulence. If you infected people with a highly virulent airborne virus in California, by the time it got to New York it would be slightly less virulent because airborne viruses tend to evolve towards fairly benign coexistance over the long run (If your host is sick at home in bed, he isn't in the office passing the disease on to his coworkers.)
If you have any information on the planning of these games, I'd love to see it.
After all, it is basically a "WHO's on first" post.
... till they come out with the "gay bathhouse" mod pack.
I think the idea thing about internet downloads (from the content maker's standpoint) is that they could customize the commercials to your interests, greatly increasing the value of ad revenue.
If they force users to use a particular format and player (and some would probably agree to) then they could update the promotions when you logged on to the net.
So the statement that 'this was not hindsight' is wrong.
l ow n_cover.shtml
This is not meerly hindsight" i.e. a situation that is only understood after the fact. There were many who predicted this outcome beforehand based on evidence, and were criticized for it. In hindsight, their prediction is confirmed.
Make sense now?
Precision and accuracy is what you are arguing for from governments. To not be precise yourself is hypocritical.
I'm arguing that they should make their best effort to present accurate information which they clearly have not done.
You know that it's impossible to prove that someone knowingly lied because a person's mind is a black box. The only way that I could do that is to give you some paper from inside the Bush administration or the CIA that ammounts to a confession. And I don't think those organizations are so stupid as to allow such information to float around freely. I believe that the executive branch lied in its case for war, and presented the evidence available to me to demonstrate this. I don't know which members of the executive branch originated the disinformation, but Bush chose his cabinet and is responsible for them.
The fact that members of the CIA were harrassed for presenting evidence contrary to the Administration line indicates that this was not simply a mistake, but was willful.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/08/10/Perspective/B
Put simply, the executive branch made claims that they should have known were not true, because independant agencies knew the claims were not true. They made clear efforts to intimidate individuals and nations who presented evidence to the contrary, indicating that they weren't simply listening to all sides and then reaching a reasonable, but incorrect, answer.
It is vindication based on highsight, and is irrelevant to the question as to whether anyone actually deliberately lied.
How else do you expect someone to be vindicated?
Honestly?
All vindication is based on hindsight. We have officials saying "we didn't know" despite the fact that they were being told so repeatedly.
Maybe they didn't hear. Maybe they didn't believe.
Willful ignorance is as good as lying and I don't see the use of arguing the difference.
Q: Of course, if we can't get the information that we need to represent our own interests, what's the point of a democracy to begin with?
A: Because in the real world, secrecy is necessary sometimes, and governments make mistakes. To believe otherwise is both idealistic and naive.
Speaking of non-sequiters, you completly evaded my question. This is beyond a mistakes and secrets. We're talking about a group (you can say the CIA or the Executive branch, as you chose) putting forward claims that they knew to be discredited in order to make their case and ruining the careers of CIA agents who disagree with them.
There is no evidence they knew it to be false.
_ fa ct1
Obviously, it's difficult to prove that someone "knew somthing to be false" if they don't want it known. For this reason, laws typically revolve, not simply around what a person does know, but what they should reasonably be expected to know and to find out (i.e. due dilligence.) Ignorance of the law is not an adequate defense, or it would be difficult to next to impossible to convict anyone. Similarly, lack of due dilligence on a matter of remarkable importance such as this should be called 'dishonest.' So to demonstrate dishonesty, we need to set a standard for due dilligence.
Particularly, we need to ask why US intelligence produced information which was worse than other international bodies.
On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. "The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic," ElBaradei said.
One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, "These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking."
The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency's Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.
It took Baute's team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa
True. But I don't quite buy the whole "right left" dichotomy for American politics. Both parties have consistently advocated growing the size of the government, despite the Republican rhetoric against such government growth.
No. If you are told by your intelligence services that there is proof, and you believe them, you say that, and then the intelligence services were mistaken, you did not lie. You were misled. There is a difference.
What makes you think that Bush listened to his intelligence services? They discredited the whole "Iraqi yellowcake" reports. They warned Bush against Chalabi, saying he was an Iranian agent.
Bush stovepiped and cherrypicked information, and he retaliated against those in the intelligence community who spoke out or refused to go along.
Well, that is kind of the point, isn't it? Its all very fine to say what we now know. This is called 'hindsight'.
But it's not "hindsight." It's vindication.
There were plenty of people calling bullshit on the reports of Iraqi nuclear weapons and attempts to procure yellowcake even before the Iraq war, but they were called sympathizers of Saddam.
Now it turns out they were right after all.
There were people who asked, when the US gov. ordered 2000 body bags before the war in Afghanistan, whether that meant the govermnet was predicting that level of casualties. We were told they wouldn't be nearly that high. Guess what? It looks like we'll have a use for every one of those bags.
We were told to trust our leaders because they were the only ones who had all the information. It turns out that trust was misplaced and they didn't have any special information. The old excuse "if you knew what I know" is often faulty.
Time and again, those with power refuse to give us accurate information because then we wouldn't make the decisions that they want us to make. "Rebuilding Iraq will pay for itself in oil revenues, etc. etc.". Of course, if we can't get the information that we need to represent our own interests, what's the point of a democracy to begin with?
Its one of the claims. But not the key one.
Key, no. Material? Yes. Otherwise the claim wouldn't have been made. To make a material claim about somthing that you know to be false is as good a definition of a lie as I can think of.
And once they get the spelling correct, they'll be able to produce innumerable perfect dupes, and hardly even have to spellcheck each one.
Imagine how much time that would save!
more nitrogen was created
Somebody please explain to the poster how elements work.
I don't think I can top that, but I suppose I'd take a page from shrinkwrap liscenses and say "this candidate does not come with any warrenties, not even the implied warranty of fitness. By casting this ballot you accept responsibility for the actions of this candidate, if elected, regardless of whether or not said candidate performs to advertised standards. "